


there's a garden in my lungs and it's your fault

by ginevraweasIey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: All Around Sad, Angst, Bisexual James Potter, F/M, Gay Regulus Black, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Regulus Black Deserves Better, Regulus Black Dies, Regulus Black-centric, Sad Ending, Sad middle, Unrequited Love, sad beginning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:21:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24478615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginevraweasIey/pseuds/ginevraweasIey
Summary: Being sick is not beautiful. It is not poetry or art or music; the pain is just pain and the blood is just blood. Regulus can’t run or walk or go up the stairs from the Slytherin common room without feeling like his lungs will burst. He’s so sick and it’s all his fault.--Regulus Black loves James Potter so much that it makes him sick. He loves him so much he's willing to die for it.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Regulus Black/James Potter
Comments: 9
Kudos: 221





	there's a garden in my lungs and it's your fault

~~**_Hanahaki disease is a fictional disease in which the victim coughs up flower petals when they suffer from one-sided love. It ends when the beloved returns their romantic feelings or when the victim dies._ ** ~~

Regulus Black is fifteen years old when he first gets sick. It’s nothing like everyone said it would be, nothing like the old stories said it would be. Being sick is not beautiful. It is not poetry or art or music; the pain is just pain and the blood is just blood. Regulus can’t run or walk or go up the stairs from the Slytherin common room without feeling like his lungs will burst. He’s so sick and it’s all _his_ fault.

Regulus hates him, hates him so much that sometimes he cries when he sees him because the hate is too much for his frail chest. He’s weak, much weaker than before. He coughs and coughs and coughs and the flowers rise from his lungs. The flowers only come when it gets really bad, he knows. And they’re not beautiful, they are so ugly. They taunt him and they laugh at his pain. They laugh in his face and it’s too much for Regulus.

Everything is too much for him, especially the pity in Sirius’s gaze when Regulus finally tells him what’s wrong. 

Summer of 1976, Regulus sees his brother for the first time in months and Sirius begs him to leave, to come with him to the Potters. Regulus can’t think of _Potter_ without his breath stopping completely in his chest. Sirius asks and asks and asks and Regulus denies and denies and denies until Sirius shoves him, hard. Regulus stumbles and coughs so much he thinks he might die right there in the street and Sirius cries, begs again for Regulus to tell him what is wrong.

He whispers _Hanahaki_ like it’s a sin that he can’t possibly admit to. And maybe it is. To say the name of his disease is to admit to the fact that Regulus loves _him_ so deeply that it will kill him. Sirius doesn’t ask who it is, but Regulus tells him anyway. There’s nothing else left for him to lose when Sirius was the only thing he had. He whispers James’s name so softly that Sirius isn’t quite sure he’s heard him correctly, but he did. It’s James. Always has been, maybe since that first day when Regulus spotted him on the platform, eleven years old and arrogant and pretty in the way boys are pretty sometimes.

And he doesn’t feel the same. Never has. James thinks he’s evil and vile and prejudiced and maybe he is. Maybe this disease is just punishment for succumbing to his mother and father and cousins and Voldemort. It’s karma coming back to feast on him until there is nothing left but the garden in his lungs. Ah, the garden in his lungs. Regulus likes the sound of that, thinks it might finally make the disease beautiful. 

Regulus Black is seventeen years old when the final stages of the disease come. He’s seventeen, just finished Hogwarts, so, so weak. He can’t believe he let it go this far, can’t believe he couldn’t just stop it all. The war is raging around them, he’s in too deep with the Dark Lord, and he is dying. Regulus is completely and utterly alone. He has nothing else to lose, hasn’t for years.

James agrees to see him only after Sirius asks. It’s awkward, so awkward, because James hates him and they never really spoke after Regulus turned fifteen or so and also James is married. He’s eighteen, almost nineteen, and he’s _married_ and Regulus feels wrong and dirty and sick and sinful.

 _I love you,_ says Regulus and James’s brown skin pales. He won’t look Regulus in his eyes. Won’t say anything. Regulus tells him everything, about the love and the flowers and the disease and the dying. James listens but he doesn’t speak and Regulus realizes he actually _did_ have something to lose. In that moment, he loses any hope, any dream of what they could’ve been. And, really, they could’ve been.

They could’ve been, if Regulus had left with Sirius that night, all those years ago, or if James had tried harder to break through those walls Regulus had put up. They could’ve been, they really could have, but they never could again. Regulus knows it’s all done. James apologizes - twice - and then he hugs Regulus tight and he leaves. It’s the last time James Potter ever sees Regulus Black.

Regulus Black is eighteen when he dies. Nobody ever knows how and, if they do learn, they believe it to be the Inferi, who dragged him to his death when he managed to find that Horcrux, weak chest and all. It was them, but, really, it was the disease that let him fall into that water and succumb to it all. Regulus falls into that water and he doesn’t fight. He lets go.

And when Regulus Black wakes up in whatever world or life there is after death, he isn’t sick anymore.

In the year that follows Regulus’s death, James moves to a cottage in Godric’s Hollow, to hide. His son is born a week after what would have been Regulus’s nineteenth birthday. Harry is only a few days old when James first spots the flower in the yard. 

It’s a light green color, delicate, and it seems to refuse to die. Lily says it’s a symbol of hope, that everything will be okay in the end, that Harry will grow up in a world at peace. James knows it isn’t; he’s cynical like that now. 

James knows it’s Regulus, knows it like he knows that the sun is hot. Regulus Black is sending his love, and, in that moment, James wishes it could’ve been different. Because eleven-year-old James Potter, who was arrogant and pretty in the way boys were pretty sometimes, had spotted Regulus Black at the platform, too. He’d seen him, ten years old and made of porcelain and aloof and interesting. 

James Potter had _seen_ Regulus, really seen him. And he’d loved him once. He wishes he could’ve loved him longer, or at least been given the chance. James Potter is twenty-one when he dies. 

And when James Potter wakes up in whatever world or life there is after death, he’s back at that platform.


End file.
